JACOBS ENDS QUALCOMM BOARD ROLE ON HIGH NOTE

For Irwin Jacobs, Qualcomm’s 20th annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday was his last as an official member of the company’s board of directors.

It was a good one to end on.

Jacobs, the 78-year-old co-founder of Qualcomm, retired from the board during a year when revenue jumped 36 percent to $15 billion. Earnings rose 33 percent to $5.4 billion, excluding certain charges. The company ended the year with about $21 billion in cash.

On Tuesday, Qualcomm also announced a 4 cent increase in its quarterly dividend to 25 cents per share. It also authorized $4 billion in stock buybacks.

The company’s share price is up 11 percent so far this calendar year.

Jacobs founded Qualcomm in 1985 and took the company public in 1991. His son, Paul Jacobs, took over as chief executive in 2005. Irwin Jacobs retained his role as board chairman until March 2009, when Paul Jacobs took over that title as well.

A former University of California San Diego professor, Irwin Jacobs helped pioneer code division multiple access technology for wireless communications. Today, various iterations of CDMA are widely used to deliver voice and data to smartphones worldwide.

“He taught us that the high road is the only road to take,” Paul Jacobs told shareholders. “He taught us to treat employees like family.”

At the meeting, Paul Jacobs also discussed a handful of familiar themes that are driving Qualcomm’s growth. Third generation, or 3G, wireless networks that rely on Qualcomm’s technology are expected to grow significantly in the next five years, especially in China, India and other developing regions.

The company’s Snapdragon application processors — the brains behind many smartphones and tablets — have been designed into 340 products to date, with another 400 products on the drawing boards.

With Microsoft’s updated Windows 8 operating system coming out later this year, Qualcomm expects that its Snapdragon processors will be designed into more laptop computers — which could vastly expand its market.

The company demonstrated the computing power in its newest Snapdragon processor — a quad-core chip that ran four high-definition video streams simultaneously. Each core in the chip, which is being sampled now by phone and tablet makers, has 1.5 Gigahertz of processing power for a combined total of 6 Gigahertz.

Qualcomm expects the chip to be ready to ship to customers in the second half of this year.

Jacobs also talked about new technology that Qualcomm is developing to increase the data capacity of overloaded wireless networks.